U.S. Spy Wars

U.S. Spy Wars

Article excerpt

Thanks to Edward Snowden, we know a lot about what the National
Security Agency has secretly been up to. As a result, Congress, a
U.S. District Court judge and the White House are considering ways
to rein in the agency and protect our privacy. But we have yet to
hear answers to key questions about how our intelligence agencies
use the NSA's cache of data: Which Americans have been targeted, and
why?

We know the NSA has compiled call records on virtually every
American who has used a phone, vacuumed up Internet data such as
chats, photographs, emails, videos and documents of targeted
foreigners and created a database from the "incidental collection"
of Americans' Internet data that it says it may search without a
court order. In the process, the NSA repeatedly exceeded its
restrictions. And, significantly, its work has been driven by
requests from "customer" agencies such as the FBI and CIA.

The Obama administration says the NSA's secret activities are
legal and crucial to protecting the nation against terrorism. But
similar national security claims led to granting our intelligence
agencies great secrecy and power during the Cold War that in turn
led to gross violations of our constitutional rights.

Only in the wake of the Watergate scandal and media reports based
on leaks of classified information did Congress hold the first and,
to date, the most thorough public hearings on intelligence
activities with respect to the rights of Americans.

In the mid-1970s, the Church Committee, named for its chairman,
Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, made shocking and still-relevant
findings. It found that J. Edgar Hoover's FBI spied on hundreds of
thousands of Americans who dissented against government policy, on
the pretext that they were part of a Kremlin-controlled plot.

The bureau went beyond surveillance to mount, in the committee's
words, a "sophisticated vigilante operation" called COINTELPRO to
"disrupt" and "neutralize" dissent, turning counterintelligence
techniques developed for use against foreign enemies on students
protesting the Vietnam War, civil rights groups and nonviolent
leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr.

FBI officials went so far as to foment violence between the Black
Panthers and a rival black power group, United Slaves, in Southern
California, the committee found, and then proudly claimed credit for
shootings and beatings.

At the University of California, FBI files subsequently uncovered
through the Freedom of Information Act show the bureau harassed
Mario Savio, a leader of the 1964 Free Speech Movement, waged a
concerted campaign to oust UC President Clark Kerr because FBI
officials disagreed with his policies and gave personal and
political help to Ronald Reagan, who had been an FBI informer in
Hollywood and as governor vowed to crack down on Berkeley protests.

The Church Committee also investigated NSA surveillance and its
relationship to its "customer" agencies and their activities. …